all the notes i took in a week by Veronica P. '27
riveting stuff, i know
Not too long ago, my desk was covered in every variety of stationary imaginable- brush pens, washi tape, wax stamps, glitter pens, you get the gist…
Today, my collection of school supplies consists of my ipad, my apple pencil, and a few loose pens and pencils that only see the light of day when midterms roll around.
While I’ve fallen far from my fifteen-highlighters-bullet-journaling-timelapse-note-taking days (or maybe the better word is recovered?), my appreciation for the act of note taking remains. So, without further ado, here are all the notes I take in a typical week of classes.
2.086- Numerical Computation for Mechanical Engineers
This class has 1 hour lectures every Monday and Wednesday, and meets for a two hour lab every week. While the lab itself focuses primarily on the computation aspect of the course- teaching us how to solve problems using Matlab- the lectures provide the theoretical basis. This week, we were reviewing linear algebra (for maybe the fifth time since I’ve gotten to MIT).
2.003- Dynamics and Control I
This class has 9 am lectures every Tuesday and Thursday, as well as one hour of recitation. For the week I’ve decided to share, we were using angular momentum principles to analyze particles and 3D bodies undergoing planar motion and learning about equivalent loads. The professor for this course loves to break up traditional lecture time with several “puzzlers,” or mini problems relevant to the material.
2.001- Mechanics and Materials I
Full disclosure, I do not have handwritten lecture notes for this course. The instructor publishes their notes before every lecture (1.5 hrs MW), so I opt to listen in and annotate those rather than create my own from scratch.
This was, however, a week that happened to be leading up to our first exam, which we’re allowed to bring in a page of handwritten notes for. We’re expected to understand and manipulate a lot of equations, so I tried to color code the variables to enhance my exam-taking experience (success rate unclear).
And that’s all! In MechE, note-taking time is somewhat negligible compared to problem solving time, at least in my experience thus far. I hope these notes were intelligible enough for you to glean something from them (even if that something is just that i love to use arrows and write really small…)
P.S.: I’m also taking a class on the history of science (STS.003), although for this one I typically just annotate the readings and lecture slides.
P.P.S: these notes are from nearly a month ago, which is approximately how long ago i told myself i was going to upload this blog